Rafferty Returns
by i-must-go-first
Summary: So what exactly *did* Gerry do when he was hypnotised in "Magic Majestic"? We find out at last. Plus, red velvet cake, confetti, prawns, a certain musician, and a great deal of bizarre behaviour.
1. Chapter 1

_So just exactly what __**did**__ Gerry do when he was hypnotized in "Magic Majestic"? I can't be the only one who has wondered. This, children, is my utterly deranged attempt to answer the question. _

**Rafferty Returns**

**Part I**

"In this particular instance, sir," Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman said in an admirably cool, unruffled tone, "odd though it may seem, it's my belief that circumstances truly beyond Gerry's control, ah, intervened. Tonight's – events – were not his fault."

"That's right," Gerry Standing piped up hastily. "I had no free will at all. I was not acting under my own volition." He risked a glance at his superior. "Obviously."

In response Sandra glared daggers at him, reminding the former D.S. that although she was standing up in his defence, she was still abundantly hacked off at him. "Shut it and let me do the talking," she hissed. "And I hope you don't have that money you didn't win in the fifth at Epsom because you weren't gambling earmarked for anything, because you'll be using it to replace my dress."

"Me? But he's the one who ripped it," Gerry protested, jerking his thumb at D.A.C. Srickland.

"Gerald. _Shut. Up_."

Ah, yes, Sandra Pullman was a credit to the Met, and indeed to women everywhere. Only she could manage to maintain such an impenetrable outer shell of dignity whilst smeared with cream-cheese frosting, decorated with confetti, and wearing one high heel and the tattered remains of a gunmetal-grey cocktail dress that was ripped precariously from one shoulder.

Gerry's eyes automatically dipped down, way down. Sandra's newly and unceremoniously altered dress certainly was offering an interesting view – one that the D.A.C. seemed to be enjoying as well.

"Here," Gerry muttered, shrugging out of his suit jacket and holding it out to Sandra. She stared at the garment with as much disdain as if he were offering her a smallpox-infested blanket. "Oh, put it on, do," he groused, and she did, deigning to yank the lapel over her right breast, which was perilously near total exposure.

Strickland looked down at his own dress shirt, which also bore tell-tale smears of frosting and red velvet cake. He'd have a bitch of a dry-cleaning bill, at the least, Gerry reflected, but it was the man's own fault. If Strickland had a more efficient right jab, he never would've ended up on his back on the top tier of the Excellence in Policing Gala Night dessert buffet in the first place. No one could blame that on Gerry, and not even Strickers could be so foolhardy as to apportion the blame to the detective superintendent.

The D.A.C. turned a mournful countenance on the shapely blonde police officer, now safely shrouded in Gerry's grey jacket. "We'll discuss this in the morning," he said stiffly. "I'm rather – sticky – at the moment."

At least Gerry waited until the door of the ladies' lounge closed behind his boss's boss before he let loose a shout of laughter.

"Oh, you think that's funny, do you?" Sandra snapped, her aquamarine eyes flashing.

"Of course it's funny!" Sandra didn't even bat an eyelash as Brian tumbled out of the large disabled-access stall at the end of the row of tasteful blond wood cubicles. He was cake- and confetti-free, and yet in his rumpled suit he still managed to look more disheveled than either Strickland or Gerry. All of Jack's cajoling and Gerry's insults hadn't been enough to pry his trusty trainers off his feet, so Brian looked odd enough to begin with, like a sort of less fashionable Stephen Frears, which was saying something.

Sandra addressed Gerry. "Well, have you had a look in a mirror? You look a _right_ pillock," she informed him with some satisfaction. "Larry, Moe – where the hell is Curly, using the bidet?"

"Em, no." Brian pushed his glasses up his considerable amount of nose. "I believe he's looking for your other shoe."

That distracted her momentarily. "Bugger it, these were new," she grumbled, hiking her left foot up onto the arm of a conveniently placed settee and leaning down to unfasten the buckle. Gerry said nothing for fear that if he spoke up he'd get stuck paying for the shoes too, and they looked expensive. He contented himself with surreptitiously admiring the curve of Sandra's thigh as it was revealed by her current posture.

At least he thought he was being surreptitious. "Enjoying the show, Gerald?" Sandra asked acidly, but she was only half-smothering a grin. "I'll tell you one thing, though: this is absolutely the final fucking straw."

"The shoe?" Brian asked blandly, and Sandra looked down a said shoe as if she were contemplating lobbing it at his head.

"No, you moron. This whole debacle. By morning UCOS will be the laughingstock of the entire Met – again." Her words dripped with disgust as she returned her foot to the floor, now shoeless, and flexed her toes. "What is it about you three that renders you incapable of attending a formal function without turning it into a bloody three-ring circus?"

"I hate circuses," commented a dour Jack, arriving just in time to hand Sandra the forlorn mate to the heel now lying abandoned on the floor. This one was encased in a sealed plastic bag, causing Sandra to direct an inquiring look at Jack. "It's a bet ripe," he explained. "Landed in the remains of the boiled prawns."

Sandra let the bag tumble to the floor and flopped down on the settee. She shot Gerry a baleful glare. "This is all your fault," she declared. "You have some sort of obsessive-compulsive need to be the centre of attention at all times, no matter what the means or the cost. Humiliate me? Enrage Strickland _and_ the commissioner? Ruin the shining moment in the sun of three very courageous and deserving police officers in a shit storm of blood-coloured cake and confetti?" She threw her arms into the air, exasperated. "Why not?"

Gerry only grinned. "Well," he drawled slowly, delighted with himself, "beats shootin' dogs, dunnit, gov?"

It had started out innocuously enough.

According to Strickland, the commissioner himself had asked that Sandra reprise her role as one of the speakers at this year's policing awards. Sandra figured that meant the commissioner was desperate to trot out someone with two X chromosomes whom he could stick up on the stage, and she'd begun to suspect that she was the only woman the D.A.C. actually knew. The only one who had anything o do with the police, at any rate.

Sandra had no choice, but, not about to let herself in for an entire evening with only her boss for company, she'd politely asked Jack if he'd do her a solid and accompany her to the fete at a stuffy Mayfair hotel.

Once Gerry got wind of Jack's involvement, he was worse than a dog with a bone or a toddler with a new toy. He refused to let the matter drop.

"You _always_ take Jack to these sorts of things," he'd whined.

"Oh, right, the hundreds of times my job has required me to attend formal dinner receptions, I've _always_ taken Jack," Sandra had retorted, rolling her eyes.

"No, I mean it. I understand why you wouldn't want _him_ goin' along –" Gerry had flung an arm in the general direction of Brian, who was noisily hoovering up the pasta salad Esther had packed him for lunch, and had acquired a great gob of mayonnaise on the tip of his nose in the process – "but why's it always gotta be Jack? What's wrong with me?"

"I can think of a thing or two," Jack had put in with a sly grin, and Sandra had chuckled into her coffee.

"Oi, I'm presentable!" Gerry had defended himself.

"Gerry, the last time you got within a hundred yards of the Excellence in Policing Awards, you started a full-scale brawl with a high-ranking senior officer," Sandra had reminded drily.

"Who turned out to be a villain and tried to break your ribs a coupla days later, so we would've all been better off if you'd let me incapacitate the twat," Gerry had volleyed back. "And anyway, that was years ago. The point is you're playin' favourites." For some reason that comment had struck both Jack and Brian as hilarious, while Sandra looked perplexed and annoyed. "It's not fair," Gerry wheedled, and Jack and Brian laughed harder.

Sandra's nasty glare encompassed all three of them. "Life isn't fair," she'd responded brightly, adjourning to her own office with her beverage and a stack of files in varying degrees of decomposition.

But whatever the reason, Gerry had taken the perceived slight to heart, and sulky Gerry was unbearable.

"Sod it," Sandra had decreed after several days of reiterated references to the gala and to Gerry's status as the general dogsbody and whipping-boy of UCOS. "We'll all go."

That had been back at the first of the year, when the March date of the formal event had been reassuringly distant on the horizon. As it had approached, Sandra had begun to grow apprehensive (with good reason, as events went on to prove).

As soon as Frank Patterson's name had come up, Sandra's unfocused sense of foreboding had transformed itself into the assurance of certain doom. Like a post-modern Nathanael, she knew that no good could come out of Bermondsey, or points to the south and east.

She'd known about the feud, too, but she'd extracted a solemn promise from Gerry that he wouldn't try anything.

Too bad she hadn't made Frank swear the same, on the point of death. Or castration, which he'd think was much worse.

_Thanks for reading, and as ever, I will write for reviews. Encourage my particular brand of insanity if you enjoy it, and stay tuned for part two._


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: Rafferty returns, and so do I. You might want to re-read part one, which I posted *only* five months ago, as a refresher. And just to make it clear, this isn't what happened when Gerry was hypnotized at the Magic Circle; this is set at the beginning of 2011. Will we ever find out what actually happened at the Magic Circle? Oh, yes, we will… if you tell me you want the sequel._

**Rafferty Returns**

**Part II**

Feud was, perhaps, a grandiose term for what had been passing between Frank and Gerry for the last several months. More accurately, it was a juvenile practical joke war, with all the resources of the Met being (mis)applied to the wiles of two grown men who were behaving like a couple of twelve-year-olds at sleep-away camp.

To be entirely fair, Sandra had to acknowledge that Frank had started it. After he'd uploaded a fake profile on Gerry's behalf to one of those despicable meet-hot-Russian-girls-who-want-to-marry-you websites, Gerry had received so many unwanted calls that he'd had to change his mobile number. He'd confessed that he was actually thoroughly sick of having women with sultry foreign accents (probably phoning from their council flats in Basingstoke) ring up to moan at him for the very reasonable price of 99p a minute.

Of course he hadn't been able to let it rest there, but had felt obliged to go Patterson one better. Gerry never could keep his mouth shut about these things, so it had been with high glee that he had related to his UCOS cronies how he had paid one of the women at Frank's favourite "gentlemen's club" to come forward as Patterson's long-lost daughter from a blurry 1980s liaison. Gerry was no wet-behind-the-ears fool, and had provided the lovely Noelle with enough information to truly freak Frank out. He'd cottoned on eventually, but was still too mortified to return to the club. That had cost Gerry two hundred quid – Frank was evidently a good tipper – but it had been money well-spent.

Most recently Frank had gone old-school and had Gerry's beloved motor towed, which would have been all well and good if he hadn't used his police connections to have it moved from impound lot to impound lot around the greater London area. It had taken Gerry four days to locate the car, and to have it returned to his possession he'd had to forfeit a total towing fee of nearly three hundred pounds.

Sandra had actually begun to feel confident in the days leading up to the gala. Both timing and Gerry's current penury were on her side: Gerry had not yet retaliated for the towing debacle (if he had, they'd all have known about it), so it was still his "turn," and she didn't think he'd risk costing himself any more wedge any time soon.

But, U-boat-like, Patterson's had been a stealth attack. Sandra hadn't seen him tonight, but he must have been hiding in the wings somewhere, waiting with ghoulish joy to see the fruits of his labours.

Sandra would murder him, only he wasn't worth the effort. She'd just had a manicure and her nails looked particularly nice.

As for Gerry – Oh, hell, who was she kidding? She had tried half-heartedly, but she couldn't work up a good head of steam over his role in this particular disaster, and Gerry certainly knew her well enough to be confident that she wasn't actually mad at him.

Whilst the four of them waited for the valet to return with Sandra's car, she engaged in the obligatory mumbling about Gerry's idiotic compulsion to one-up Patterson and how it had gotten them all into this mess – which was true enough. But to a certain extent she was just going through the motions. This sort of antic was part of what made Gerry _Gerry_. A few disgruntled words from her weren't going to change the habit of a lifetime.

And, let's be honest, she wouldn't really want them to. She'd sort of… gotten used to the old tosser after all this time.

Besides, what happened tonight really wasn't his fault. For once she wasn't just trying to soft-sell Strickland. If she thought for an instant that Gerry had orchestrated this mess, or had even been a willing participant, she'd let him fry.

_Now, Sandra, that's a bit hypocritical, innit?_ demanded a sardonic internal voice that sounded irritatingly like the subject of her thoughts.

Damn Patterson and fucking Gerry fucking Rafferty anyway.

_Hypnotism_, for Christ's sake. It was so ludicrous that it had to be true, which, fortunately, was what the detective superintendent's boss seemed to have concluded. If Sandra hadn't been there the first time, three years ago, she never would have believed it.

Well, actually, if she hadn't been there either time, presumably – _it_ – never would have happened. Back at the Magic Circle, she had been the only woman in the room, likely the only one in the entire building, which somehow savoured of a preteen boy's grimy, grubby, vaguely obscene bolthole.

Of course she hadn't been the only woman at the gala tonight, but she _had_ been the one up on stage about to give a speech. She smirked grimly as she imagined what could've happened if Gerry had selected, say, the commissioner's wife or daughter as the object of his ardent, ah, demonstrations. – But he was pre-programmed, as it were.

She recalled the dazed look in his eyes when Gerry had finally reached her on the edge of the stage, before they had become intimately acquainted with the dessert buffet. His pupils had practically been glazed over. No, the man hadn't a _clue_ what he was doing.

But Sandra had.

She felt herself flush as if one of the others would read her thoughts, and reached to remove Gerry's jacket and restore it to its owner as a wave of prickly heat rolled over her chest and neck. The cold night air was a welcome relief and, at this point in the evening, what was a little public exposure more or less?

Her plan to return the jacket was thwarted, though, because Gerry had vanished.

It was probably just as well. She didn't relish the thought of standing in close proximity to him out there in the darkness, even with Jack and Brian just in front of her. Gerry might not remember what happened an hour and a half ago, but Sandra sure as hell did. Vividly.

She shivered and felt herself blush uncontrollably. Thank God it was dark.

She could say it had happened because she was caught completely off guard – but that was what Jack would call a load of old cobblers.

Sandra darts a look at her two colleagues. Shit, they didn't realize what she'd done, did they?

Brian's pursed lips and smudged spectacles and Jack's nonchalant yawn reassured her. The secret of knowledge was hers alone, then.

"Oi, aren't you cold, or do you just like showin' off?"

She actually jumped when she heard Gerry's voice inches to her left, and whirled to face him. "Jesus, you made me jump."

"Not Jesus, just Gerald."

Sandra groaned and Brian scolded, "Oh, Gerry, that was bad even for you."

"Where'd you disappear to, anyway?"

Gerry looked askance at his governor. "Need your permission now to pop into the loo, do I, madam?"

The valet pulled Sandra's car up to the kerb and as she took the keys Sandra arrested Gerry's progress. "In the back," she ordered. "You reek of seafood."

"Lovely," muttered Brian, who got stuck next to the ex-D.S.

"Both of you shut it," Sandra instructed as she put the car in gear. "It's been a long evening and my patience has worn exceedingly thin. And if you get frosting on the upholstery, you can pay to have it cleaned," she added as an after-thought.

In the privacy of the front seat, though, she permitted herself a tiny smile. When, as a lonely teenager, Sandra Pullman had dreamed of following in her adored father's footsteps, and had envisioned all the scenarios a career in the police might spawn, never had she included a night remotely like this one. But that was before she'd met her boys.

As they mingled before dinner, sipping cocktails, music filtered vaguely through the airy rooms thanks to a massive sound system. "What do they think this is?" Jack had groused near Sandra's ear. "A Rolling Stones concert?"

Gerry, never far from Sandra's elbow, grinned. "Eddie Murphy."

The superintendent blinked blankly. "The actor? What's he got to do with it?"

"No, D.S. Eddie Murphy, retired, formerly of the Sweeney. Mate of mine. Plays squash at the weekend with the commissioner."

Sandra pursed her lips. "And this is remotely relevant because –"

"His son's a deejay, yeah? And behold, for the first time in recorded history –"

Jack glowered. "The Excellence in Policing Awards have a deejay."

"You reckon he's got anything over there other than seventies elevator pop?" Sandra muttered, trying and failing to stifle a yawn.

"I'll go see," Gerry said cheerfully, and as he strode off, Jack darkly put in, "I don't see why you couldn't have just brought Gerry, as he was so keen to come."

Sandra tossed back the remains of her champagne and shrugged. "It's the principle of the thing, Jack."

"Speaking of Gerry –" Brian cast an anxious look in his friend's direction before jerking his thumb toward the nearest speaker. "Isn't this – ah –"

Jack frowned, listening. "Bugger, it is," he confirmed.

"What?" asked Sandra, more concerned with her attempts to snag another flute of champagne.

"This song," Jack explained grimly, and the blonde's forehead wrinkled in concentration.

"Gerry Rafferty," Brian supplied.

"Baker Street," Jack added.

"What, you think Gerry's going to…?" She automatically looked over her shoulder. Gerry was calmly chatting with Eddie Murphy's progeny. "Don't be ridiculous," the superintendent scoffed, transferring her attention back to the two men in front of her. "That whole hypnotism thing was _years_ ago."

"Doesn't matter," Brian replied grimly. "This song is his trigger."

"He seems fine." Sandra caught the eye of the subject of their conversation and gave him the high sign, raising her empty glass. He nodded and pivoted, hot on the trail of a young blonde server.

"It's not even very loud," Jack put in. "Besides, we're in the middle of a crowd. Surely Gerry wouldn't –" He broke off, cutting his eyes at the governor.

Sandra coolly transferred all her weight to one long leg. "He wouldn't," she said confidently.

"Never underestimate the power of magic," Brian grumbled, and Sandra resolutely turned to go in search of more stimulating conversation.

Eventually Gerry ambled up with two full flutes of champagne. "Danny – Eddie's kid – said he's just running through a playlist," he informed Sandra, handing over one of the glasses and clinking the rims together. "It's not so bad, though. I haven't heard some of these songs in yonks."

For once she didn't comment on Gerry's dubious taste in music. Nor did she point out that "Baker Street" was playing again. For the third time.

Sandra smelled something rotten in the air tonight. It was redolent of Frank Patterson's hair gel and cheap fags.

Hearing the song once, even twice, could've been put down to coincidence. But three times?

She darted a glance at Gerry. He stood at her elbow, placidly drinking champagne. Feeling her eyes on him, he looked over and smiled. "By the way, gov, just in case no one's told you, you look beautiful."

She twinkled a smile at him. "Cheers, Gerry. That's a positively smashing tie you're wearing."

"Sandra, you look lovely this evening."

She turned to flash her teeth at Strickland. "Thank you, sir."

The D.A.C. spared a glance for the superintendent's companion. "Hello, Gerry. I didn't realize you were coming."

"Oh, the gang's all here," Sandra supplied, and Gerry grinned loftily.

"Wouldn't have missed it."

"Have you seen the programme?" Strickland queried, transferring his attention back to Sandra. "It's self-serve heavy hors d'oeuvres this year, so no one has to suffer through the agony of the meal service. The commissioner does his bit, then I do the welcome, and you're on. Short speech, then we do the presentations together, applause applause, dessert, and off to the cash bar."

"You can buy me a drink, sir," Sandra said matter-of-factly, and Strickland nodded.

"Understood, Superintendent. I'll see you in there."

"I'd at least get two out of him for this," Gerry muttered near her ear, and Sandra offered an exaggerated flutter of her eyelashes.

"No need. That's why I let you tag along."

"Oddly, I forgot me wallet," Gerry retorted disingenuously, and Sandra responded with a less-than-elegant snort.

It had all gone downhill from there.

Since Gerry lived nearest Sandra, the only logical course of action was for her to drop Brian and Jack off first and then deliver the Cockney to his doorstep, although the superintendent would much rather have just opened the car door and pitched him onto the kerb.

_Be fair, Sandra_, her internal teacher-voice scolded. _This debacle wasn't really Gerry's fault, and it's not his fault that you're currently so uncomfortable you feel like you may break out in hives at any second._

"I'm sorry, Sandra," Gerry said softly from his penalty box in the back seat, as if reading her thoughts, and she met his bright eyes for a second in the rearview mirror. He looked and sounded appropriately contrite. "I'm sorry about your speech and, ah, your dress. And causin' a scene."

_Interesting wording_, she thought. Gerry was apologizing for the brawl with Strickland that had stopped her carefully rehearsed speech before it ever started, and for the utter destruction of the cocktail dress it had taken her three weekends to select, but he wasn't apologizing for the big event, the one that set off the whole absurd chain reaction.

Her chest felt itchy, and she was sure that if she looked down she would see red blotches mottling her skin. At least she could blame the shellfish.

She couldn't stop her mind from replaying those twenty or thirty seconds that had assumed the exaggerated proportions of hours. As the commissioner had finished up his introductory remarks, Sandra discreetly slid her chair back from the table and prepared to join Strickland in the wings. Gerry leaned over and clicked the rim of his champagne flute against hers again. "Break a leg, gorgeous," he said, and then looked surprised, as if he'd intended to go with the usual "gov" and it had come out wrong. She raised her eyebrows and telegraphed an "I'll deal with you later," and then slipped off to do her bit.

In truth, at the moment she'd been feeling abashed at her insistence that the entire team come along to the gala. While Jack looked grimly resolute and Brian was sweating in his limp, too-tight dress shirt collar, Gerry had made himself the model companion, unobtrusively refilling her glass before it was empty, furnishing her with choice nibbles from the hot bar, and quietly cracking the occasional joke to make her forget about the jitters she wouldn't admit she had.

And, come on, every girl liked to be told she looked beautiful now and then.

As she had these thoughts, Sandra stood in the wings, shielded by a burgundy velvet curtain – why were all stage curtains burgundy? – idly sipping her champagne and half listening to Strickland. The man was a dreadful public speaker, liberally peppering his discourse with awkward hems and haws. She'd sound like Daniel bloody Webster in comparison.

Mercifully, he – Strickland, not Daniel Webster – was winding down, and Sandra was so eager to have this whole thing over with and get pissed on large G&T's at the cash bar that she'd forgotten to be nervous, when it happened. The sound system roared to life and incongruously, horrifically, the opening notes of "Baker Street" wailed through the speakers, drowning out everything else.

Strickland stopped abruptly and waited with exaggerated patience for the situation to be sorted out, half annoyed, half amused. It was a cinch Murphy the Younger wouldn't be getting any more gigs at the Met. Sandra peeked past the folds of the curtain and glimpsed a scowling, red-faced commissioner and his merrily tittering wife. She didn't even realize she was automatically searching for Gerry to check whether this was having any ill effects on him until her gaze fell on the two empty spaces separating Jack and Brian and her eyes widened. Shit, where was he?

Jack made alarmed eye-contact with her, but Brian seemed to be focused on something – someone – over her shoulder. Her skin prickling with alarm, Sandra whirled and found Gerry – well, he wasn't tall enough to loom, but there he was, anyway, just behind her, and he wasn't stopping.

She had long enough to take one look at him and register his pasty skin and wild eyes. _Bugger it_, she thought, _here we go again_, and grabbed for his wool-covered elbow to maneuver him further away from the stage. He stood firm, exerting a surprising amount of strength as she tugged. "Gerry," she hissed. "_Gerry! _Do you know where you are?"

He blinked once and swallowed hard, his free hand coming up to cup her bare arm.

Rafferty abruptly fell silent and Sandra threw aloft a tiny prayer of Thanksgiving. "It's over now," she said quickly, striving to sound soothing rather than irritated and bitchy. "You're all right. Go back and sit down – or you can just stay here while I do my speech. No one can see you if you stand back here."

Gerry was still staring at her like a zombie – an adoring zombie with a glimmer of desperation in his eyes. _Fuck._

She heard Strickland introducing her and tried again, as gently as she could, to wrench away from Gerry. For possibly the first time in her life Sandra erred on the side of being _too_ gentle, and for her troubles she ended up with her arms pinned to her sides and their bodies pressed together.

She could have kneed him in the groin and sprinted out onto the stage, but that didn't quite seem like fair play. This wasn't the real Gerry, but the family jewels she was contemplating putting permanently out of commission did belong to him, as would the pain and suffering.

Besides, she'd like to make it through _one_ police gala without being caught in the midst of an embarrassing scene.

"Gerry," she repeated urgently.

Then, as she remembered it, several things happened nearly simultaneously. "I have to give my sodding speech, Gerry," she stage-whispered, pissed off, and as if her words had penetrated his Rafferty-induced fog, he released one of her arms – so he could comb his fingers through her hair as his mouth covered hers.

She heard Brian's voice, very nearby, as he groaned, "Gerry, mate, not again," and then Strickland was exclaiming, "Gerry – Sandra! What the hell? Gerry, Jesus, let her go! What's the matter with you?"

Suddenly Gerry was wrenched away from her and Sandra felt a different hand on her shoulder. It took a second for her to process the surreal scene unfolding in front of her: while attempting to shield Sandra as if she were some bloody damsel in distress, Strickland was engaging in one-armed combat with Gerry, who was protesting violently and trying to get back to Sandra's side – or her back or front or wherever, as long as he was in her near vicinity. She snorted at the two of them going at it as if they thought they were Basil Rathbone and Errol fucking Flynn. This could not end well.

As she jumped between them to referee, Strickland threw a wild right cross that landed squarely on Sandra's jaw, and without even thinking she hit back.

Her technique was much better than Strickland's. So was Gerry's, and his expression had turned murderous the instant the DAC's fist accidentally connected with his governor's face. No way could Strickland withstand the simultaneous onslaught.

Gerry's voice from the backseat interrupted her thoughts. "If Strickland boxed for his house, his house must have sucked," he said, and again she had the alarming sensation that he could read her mind.

"Yeah," she agreed.

"I really am sorry, gov."

"I know, Gerry. These things… happen."

"No, they don't."

"They do at UCOS," she answered with grim amusement.

She'd heard something rip, felt Strickland grab for her in a frantic attempt to stop himself from windmilling backward right off the stage, and then Gerry grabbed her from behind, and the next thing she knew, there was a quick, violent jerk on the shoulder strap of her very expensive dress and the the three of them unceremoniously plunged off the stage and onto the dessert bar. They landed on the giant centerpiece, a red velvet cake that could have fed the entire cast and crew of _Ben Hur_, with a squishy thud.

Sandra had heard the collective gasp of the Met's finest but, for some reason, she couldn't see anything. She tasted cream cheese frosting, Gerry was plastered to her back, and she realized she was straddling her boss – and that had better be a flashlight in Strickland's pocket, or she'd have to kill him. The dark, thick thing obscuring her vision had to be that damned burgundy curtain, and as she lifted her arms to scrabble with it, she registered cool air on parts of her anatomy she always made it a policy to keep covered at Met functions.

_Fuck_, she thought, or maybe said aloud – probably said aloud. Was there any way this situation could become any more humiliating and career-damaging?

At least she'd managed to escape from the clutches of the stage curtain.

That was exactly when she heard the splintering crack, and a second later the abused buffet table buckled under the strain of their combined weight. Strickland emitted a high-pitched strangling noise as Sandra and Gerry once again landed atop him, and Sandra had a beautifully clear view of the confetti that had been used to decorate the table (because evidently someone had gotten the Excellence in Policing Awards confused with a six-year-old's birthday party) showering down to decorate the three of them as if midnight had just struck on New Year's Day.

"Thanks for the lift," Gerry murmured sedately, and oh, yeah, she actually had pulled up outside his building. "I'll, ah, see you Monday."

"Monday," she echoed vaguely, exhausted and eager to get away from the Gerry's, both Standing and Rafferty, and home to her own flat, where she could change into something both less flavourful and less aerated.

Her foot came down rather more forcefully than necessary on the accelerator, and the car screeched into the night. This evening's fiasco was abundantly humiliating; at least no one else knew her shameful secret, the cream-cheese frosting on the cake of her personal mortification. No one – least of all poor, infuriating, hypnotized Gerry. Strickland and Brian hadn't been close enough to see; of that she was fairly confident. Gerry wouldn't remember. So no one knew, and Sandra certainly would never tell.

No one else ever, ever had to know that when Gerry Standing had grabbed his boss and kissed her at the least appropriate of times in the least appropriate of places, Sandra Pullman had gone completely insane and had – just for a second – done exactly what she hadn't done three years ago.

She'd kissed him back.

_So that's the last of Gerry Rafferty… or is it? Stay tuned for the follow-up, Rafferty's Revenge, available soon at fine bookshops everywhere – or, you know, here. But still soon._


End file.
